Hand Tinting Your Digital Photo In Adobe Elements

By David Peters

Beginners Adobe Elements Tutorial

If you want to make your photos fabulous all you need to do is add a bit of hand tinting and you can turn something ordinary into something extraordinary. Whether you want to add a bit of color to a black and white photo, alter colors in your existing colored photo, or even put some black and white into your colored photos you can create masterpieces worthy of an art gallery.

I always recommend you work with a copy of your photo so your first step is to open the photo in your software program then choose file and save as to give it a new name. I also always tell people to save their work to their desktop so you can easily find it while you are working on it.

The first thing you want to do is open up the layers palette and drag the photo background layer to the copy icon, thereby creating a new copy of your photo on a different layer; from here you want to click on "Target" and select this new layer and remove the color from your photo by pressing SHIFT+CTRL+U. Now you want to open up your levels dialog box by either using the windows menu or pressing CTRL+L.

I also like to hit "Auto" to see what my image looks like before I begin to play around with it. If you want to darken shadows you can adjust the Black slider more to the right; conversely, to brighten the highlights you can move the White slider to the left; when this is finished you can click OK.

Now select the the eraser tool, using a soft round brush set at round 5-10% opacity and about 30 pixels breadth. While bearing in mind that you are trying for a soft, transparent look you can begin to erase the areas on your photograph where you would like to see a bit more color. If you make a mistake, or erase too much, remember that you can use the Undo, or Ctrl+Z button at anytime to get back what you accidentally erased.

You can then increase the the brush size to enhance areas where you would like more color and then you can either merge all of the layers or just flatten and save your fabulous hand-tinted digital photo.

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